Canadian study finds aggressive kids become sickly grown-ups

Canadian study finds aggressive kids become sickly grown-ups

By Sharon Kirkey

Children who behave aggressively have a higher risk of facing health problems 30 years later, a large new Canadian study has found.

Researchers from the Universite de Sherbrooke, Concordia University, the University of Ottawa and the University of California (Davis) analyzed data from a large study tracking nearly 4,000 Montreal children since the late 1970s.

Researchers found that those who were aggressive when they were younger were in poorer health when they got older. They made more visits to doctors and emergency departments; they had more injuries and more lifestyle-related illnesses such as obesity, diabetes, ulcers and drug and alcohol abuse, compared to children considered more likable by their peers.

The new study suggests aggression in childhood has lasting effects on a person’s physical health.

“With our rising health care costs, with our aging population, we need to try to find out, are there markers in childhood that can reliably predict who will have poorer health in adulthood?” said first author Caroline Temcheff from the Universite de Sherbrooke. The study appears in this week’s issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Related

Chronic stress in childhood might permanently rewire the body’s normal physiological response to stress and predispose people to unhealthy behaviours as a way of dealing with their stress, Dr. Sarah Stewart-Brown, of the department of public health at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom said in a related commentary.

For their study, the team analyzed data from the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project. From 1976 to 1978, 3,913 children in grades one, four and seven were enrolled; all lived in neighbourhoods with low socioeconomic status in Montreal.

The researchers looked to see how many medical services the children in the study received between 1992 and 2006, when they were in young to middle adulthood.

They found that adults who scored higher on aggression when they were children made more medical visits to doctors, more visits due to injuries, more visits for life-style related illnesses, more visits to specialists, more visits to emergency departments and were admitted to hospital more frequently.

Those with less education were more likely to use more health services when they were older,

“Childhood aggression should be considered a health risk when designing interventions to improve public health, particularly those targeting children and families,” the researchers write in the CMAJ.